


Until the final hours you’ll have me

by Solshine



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Getting spruced up for Armageddon, Haircuts, Lots of wistful lingering touches and just gay yearning in general, M/M, Personal grooming as catharsis, Pining, Takes place a couple days before Warlock’s birthday party, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 23:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20665496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: A quiet night alone with the ticking doomsday clock. There isn’t time to say all the things they already know; there’s just enough time for a deep breath, a bottle of wine, and a haircut.





	Until the final hours you’ll have me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunatic_Blues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunatic_Blues/gifts), [nantook (Yuugisgirl)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuugisgirl/gifts), [curious_Lissa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/curious_Lissa/gifts).

> Just a little bit of Yearning for the lovely people who have been inspired by ‘something to do with these sacred words,’ blessing me with two translations and a podfic <3 Remember to always love on the artists that interpret our favorite interpretive works — translators and podficcers deserve just as many comments and kudos!!!

Aziraphale and Crowley resign from their positions in the Dowling household three days before the antichrist’s eleventh birthday. Without discussing it, they meet at the end of the estate's long drive and get into Crowley's waiting car. 

The drive back to London is made in silence. Crowley parks in front of the bookshop and follows Aziraphale inside, as though he is expected to. He isn't wrong.

“I thought I might open the Montrachet,” Aziraphale calls to Crowley, who has disappeared into the toilet, the door left ajar. All Aziraphale gets from within is a sort of grunt. He takes it as assent.

He takes out the wine but then stands for a long moment, just looking at it. In the warped reflection of the bottle, he can see his Brother Francis face, and it almost startles him; the familiar bookshop, warm and dim and hidden even from the blue of coming twilight, makes the last decade seem almost like a dream. He snaps the disguise away absently, which only intensifies the feeling. It could as easily be eleven years ago. There's nothing to say they don't still have time.

“Don't you remember where your own corkscrew is?” Crowley's voice behind him still bears the slightest tint of Scots to it, like the blur of scrubbed off lipstick barely pinking his mouth. His hair is long, longer than it was eleven years prior, when they last drank together in this room. It dents the illusion. Time  _ has  _ passed — the end, as they say, is nigh.   
  
Crowley, Aziraphale knows, usually manifests everything he wears, while Aziraphale is the one with a closet full of carefully maintained clothes. Tonight, it seems, they are playing against their types. Crowley pads in bare feet to the drawer with the corkscrew, and Aziraphale watches him. He's still wearing Nanny's skirt and dark shirt, half undone, but the persona has been left crumpled on the washroom floor, next to, Aziraphale is sure, her jacket and tights. 

He looks… disassembled. He looks tired. 

Aziraphale would say he'd never seen Crowley in such a state, if it were true. As long as they’d known each other, one saw a lot of things.

They made a plan, eleven years ago, and here are the results: one relatively normal antichrist, and no indication whatsoever whether they succeeded in changing anything. Nothing to do but wait. Aziraphale expected they would  _ know _ , that it would be obvious one way or the other.

Crowley turns and hands him the corkscrew. Aziraphale uncorks the wine, and pours them each a glass.

“Never holding down a human job again,” Crowley says. “Very overrated.” 

Aziraphale thinks of Crowley leading little Warlock by the hand down Brother Francis’s garden paths, and says nothing. It’s more than some underpaid overtime that Crowley bears in the slump of his shoulders, Aziraphale knows.   
  
“Indeed,” he says. 

He doesn't see from where Crowley produces the pair of scissors — maybe he miracled them, or maybe they're a forgotten pair of Aziraphale’s. They look like they could be, touch-burnished metal and vaguely antique. Crowley holds them out to him, handles first the way people used to do with daggers in the old days.

“If you don't mind,” Crowley says. Aziraphale doesn't have to ask what he means. What small favors don't your end up doing for someone, in six thousand years?

“Of course, dear,” he says, and accepts the scissors.

Crowley goes into the next room and moves a stack of books from the seat of a dusty wooden chair hiding in the corner, and sets them carefully next to a bookshelf. He pulls the chair out into a moderately clear space and sits down in it with the slow finality of a boulder rolling to a rest in a field, like he might never be persuaded to move again. He sips his wine and rolls his head to rest on his own shoulder, eyes closed.

Aziraphale fills a cup of water and carries it over to stand behind Crowley. He takes a sip of the wine and sets both down on the low table. His hand lifts and hovers over Crowley’s long, rumpled locks for a moment, before his fingers settle lightly on Crowley’s head. Crowley breathes an almost imperceptible sigh.   
  
“How short?” Aziraphale asks quietly.   
  
“Short,” Crowley says. “Take it off.”   
  
He runs his hand through Crowley’s long red hair, his fingers snagging in the tangles of an updo taken down carelessly. Aziraphale thinks of hair blowing in a desert wind as thunderclouds gathered on the horizon. He doesn’t remember the names of the cities the Flood washed away, or the song someone sang to their children as they all huddled on the roof of their hut, or whether he wept when the waters receded. But he remembers Crowley’s dusty hair, the braid behind his ear.   
  
“All right,” Aziraphale says.   
  
A tortoiseshell comb appears in Aziraphale’s hand, and he draws it patiently through Crowley’s hair, starting at the bottom, working in sections, dipping it in the cup of water from time to time. When it hangs smooth and straight down his back, Aziraphale drags his fingers through it again, slowly, carefully.   
  
He gathers Crowley’s hair in his hands, and the backs of his knuckles brush Crowley’s pale neck. He collects a few stray strands and lets his fingertips trace the same path, from Crowley’s nape to the rumpled collar of his shirt. The demon shivers. 

Aziraphale hasn’t done this for Crowley for almost a hundred years. Certainly he’s never taken so much — it puts him in mind of how humans used to cut their hair as a sign of mourning.

_ And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. _

The thought of preemptive grief is seductive. Pessimism does not strike Aziraphale as particularly angelic, but if they've gotten this wrong so much will be lost, so much he's spent a decade becoming unwilling to give up.

Crowley’s hair is thick and soft in his hands. If Aziraphale takes more than he might otherwise dare, of hair or anything else… well. Grief has its privileges.   
  
He holds the comb between two fingers, and parts out a small section of hair in his hand. The scissors open with a small scraping noise in the silent bookshop, and Aziraphale cuts a hank of hair and lets it fall to the floor.   
  
Great ropes of hair follow one after another, gathering in coppery heaps around the chair like autumn leaves. When Aziraphale stops and sets down the scissors to pick up his wine again, Crowley’s hair is choppy and tufted, already shorter than it’s been since the sixties. Crowley reaches up to rake exploratory fingers over the back of his head. Aziraphale curls his empty hand over Crowley’s shoulder, and the restless shifting of the demon’s body stills.   
  
“Not too much?” Aziraphale says.   
  
Crowley’s other hand comes up and grazes a touch over the back of Aziraphale’s. The angel swallows.    
  
“I trust you,” says Crowley.   
  
Aziraphale cuts in silence for some minutes, combing and parting. A gentle snow of trimmed hair settles on Crowley’s shoulders and on the scuffed wood floor, and Aziraphale can imagine the bits drifting into corners with the dust bunnies, never to be totally tracked down and swept out, filling the bookshop indelibly with Crowley.   
  
That is, of course, if fire doesn’t fall from the sky and reduce the old shop to ash before the week is out.    
  
There’s no reason to believe it will. The boy is  _ normal _ , they did exactly what they set out to do, and it’s entirely possible that in three days precisely nothing will happen, and everything will go back to…

He finishes neatening the back of Crowley’s neck and runs a thumb over his work.   
  
Once he had gone so slowly, so tentatively, paralyzed by fear and indecision, but the past eleven years have gathered behind the two of them like the building weight of an avalanche, pushing Aziraphale forward, making every moment strained and precious. Now, it’s only hope that holds him back. He will not burn down the best chance they have for happiness in a haze of incautious panic that the world might end with things unsaid; if the world does not end, he doesn’t want a single shining memory. He wants the whole future, here, with Crowley. 

Aziraphale circles around to Crowley’s front, gently straightening hair with short strokes of the comb. He keeps his eyes on his work, but he is very aware of Crowley’s yellow eyes watching him from under the damp curls sticking to his forehead. Crowley, Aziraphale knows, is only waiting for Aziraphale’s cue. Crowley has never been overburdened with caution, or with hope.

He keeps the front and top long for Crowley to style as he likes. The sideburns he trims close, the edges of the scissor blades grazing Crowley’s cheeks. Carefully, carefully. Crowley’s breath is warm on Aziraphale’s wrist, the tide of it slow and overly measured.

A bit of hair is stuck to Crowley’s jaw, just under the twining form of his snake. Aziraphale brushes it away with a drag of fingertips against skin that lingers longer than it needs to, traces down almost to the corner of Crowley’s mouth.   
  
Crowley reaches up and cages Aziraphale’s hand in his, as softly as though he fears to offend. He turns his head and touches his lips to the ends of Aziraphale’s fingers. His eyes, fixed upon Aziraphale’s, are like the flames of gaslamps, warm and steady, and they ask permissions that Crowley’s otherwise occupied mouth would never dare.   
  
Aziraphale pulls his hand out of Crowley’s, as slowly and gently as he can. If he has to push Crowley away someday for his own sake, he will, but this tonight is no rejection. Crowley’s answering looks says he knows it -- his expression is tired, not wounded.   
  
“You look perfectly handsome, dear fellow,” Aziraphale says, folding his hands around the scissors and smiling. 

“I’d better,” he says, and runs a hand through the results, disheveling it thoroughly. “Gotta look sharp for the End of Days.” He looks askance at Aziraphale. “Don't suppose I should thank you.”

Aziraphale's eyes crinkle at the familiar line.

“Best not,” he says. He looks at Crowley, and his heart, oh, his heart. “I don’t even like you, you know.”

Crowley chuckles silently at the old alibi turned inside joke, turned something else. A confession?

What else is there left to confess, though, after all this time?

No matter. The moment has passed. Crowley shakes himself. The pain and fatigue have lifted a little from his frame, as though Aziraphale has shorn him of more than hair. Strangely, Aziraphale feels lighter, too.   
  
“Another glass?” Aziraphale says.   
  
Crowley tosses back what remains of his wine, and holds the empty glass out to Aziraphale. Aziraphale takes it, and Crowley stands up and stretches.    
  
“Have you got a broom around here someplace?” he asks. Aziraphale clicks his fingers surreptitiously.    
  
“One in the cupboard, I believe,” he says, smiling, and goes to get the bottle of wine.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Until the final hours you'll have me, by Solshine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22250989) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig)


End file.
